Susan Fanetti

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how dearly I love my adopted home state of California.

I’m a native Midwesterner, born in St. Louis and mostly raised there (we lived in Milwaukee for a few years when I was in grade school). A lot of my adult life was also lived in Missouri and the “Metro East” area of Illinois. I got all my degrees in colleges in the St. Louis area. I married a man from the St. Louis area. Our two oldest sons graduated from a St. Louis high school, and they both have mainly stayed put, now married and establishing their own businesses in that area.

I located my first (and most popular) books, the Signal Bend series, in mid-Missouri, creating a fictional town strongly based on St. James, MO, the town nearest the small non-working “farm” my beloved grandparents retired to, where I spent big chunks of my childhood and created a bushel of happy core memories.

My roots in the Midwest, specifically Missouri, are deep.

But I renounced Missouri years ago.

There are many things I love about the state of my birth, but, barring causes I can’t imagine at this time, I will never, ever live in Missouri again. Because our older sons and their spouses are well established there, and I am tired of living 2000 miles from them, our Plan A for our coming retirement years is to return to the area, but we are exclusively looking in Illinois. (Recently we’ve had to develop a few retirement plans, so we can respond to the changes around us, but our top plan remains getting the fam back together.)

Even so, even then, I will always consider myself a California girl.

My attraction to and fascination with California began long before I ever stepped foot on its soil. In TV shows and movies, books and magazines, it always seemed so magically beautiful and … I don’t know, just, like, perfect. My parents cast aspersions and made the usual snide (and I now realize wildly … let’s say “inappropriate” and move on) comments about it, but all I saw was beauty and fun and freedom. Probably a lot of my fascination, at first, stemmed from the simple fact that I am a person who from the moment I understood the concept, loved the ocean, and the Pacific is glorious. But I was landlocked and nearly 20 years old before I ever focused my actual eyes on the actual sea.

Thankfully, my uncle and aunt got stationed in the LA area, and California entered the family vacation options menu.

When I finally got there (that first trip was the typical SoCal family vacation—LA, San Diego, and all the theme parks between, with a day trip into Mexico) my first impression was that my fantasy couldn’t touch the reality. When I saw how much more than ocean and palm trees and sun California was, when I realized it was a gorgeous mélange of culture, and food, and architecture, and people, and … I was gobsmacked. California is bigger, bolder, more vibrant, more beautiful, more dynamic than my imagination ever conjured.

That feeling has never really left me. Since that first trip, I’ve lived in both SoCal (San Bernardino) and NorCal (the Sacramento area, and a few months in the East Bay) for a total now of more than twenty years of my adult life. I understand now, of course, that California is far from perfect. I have had plenty of WTF moments living here. But I also understand how very close to perfect it is in ways that are important to me. In its natural beauty and its human vivacity, California is the first place I’ve lived that feels like I belong.

In my mind, to my eyes, California is the best state in the US and the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—and I’m including my international travel in that assessment. When we leave, if we leave, we will mourn, even as we rush toward the chance to have our family as reunited as it can be.

In the meantime, we are sucking the marrow out of this magnificent state, traveling throughout it, partaking of everything it has to offer—the big centerpieces, like Yosemite, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller delights, like Mono Lake, the Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, the Valhalla Renaissance Faire.

Jim and I just got home from a lovely getaway to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. Nature is my church. Ocean, forest, river, canyon, lake, rolling meadow, waterfall—that’s where I feel true peace and the presence of something great and mysterious around me. And one thing above all others inspires reverence in me: the Giant Sequoia. I am utterly awed and humbled by those extraordinary titans, towering up from the Sierras like ancient gods. To stand at their massive feet literally brings me to tears. To me, they are ancient gods.

The very largest trees on the planet, among the very oldest, and they exist only here.

I guess in that way I’m like a Giant Sequoia: I thrive only in California soil.

For various reasons, that’s what’s on my mind today. I hope you’re safe and exactly where you want to be this weekend. I’ll have some more author-oriented content for you in a couple weeks.

Love,
s—